Frank Kafka's Metomorphosis

A substantial number of authors of great literature write from personal experiences. Franz Kafka (1883–1924) seems to be the core of modern-day estranged authors and anxiety; Kafka’s work depicts the tribulations he himself dealt with throughout the course his own existence. From the beginning of his life, it is apparent that he was out of place. Being Czech in the Austro-Hungarian empire, a German-speaker among Czechs, a Jew among non-Jews; distanced from his overbearing entrepreneurial father, from his bureaucratic job, from the opposite sex; caught between a desire to live in literature and to live a normal bourgeois life; acutely and lucidly self-critical; the physically weak Kafka was unable to find a suitable atmosphere to suit his own preferences. The discomforts of his life are expressed accurately and imaginatively in “The Metamorphosis,” a novella that illustrates the many underlying themes of Kafka’s life both with symbolism as well as characterization. Two of the...